Rejection hurts, but it serves a purpose

You may have noticed that some women are more popular than others. Way more popular. Demand for them greatly exceeds their supply.

Fortunately homo sapiens has evolved a way to resolve this imbalance without men evolving antlers and headbutting each other to compete for their affections. It's the fear of rejection.

Feedback is a gift

Social rejection hurts. It activates the same part of the brain as physical pain, and our brain learns to avoid things that hurt. This avoidance manifests itself as fear, ranging from unease to full-on terror.

The result is that, in real life, most men will only approach women that they both find attractive and who aren't likely to reject them. They won't approach women who are too attractive because they are, literally, scared of them.

This works well from a woman's perspective. She's only approached by a handful of men, most of whom have a chance of being suitable. (OK, some of the men are really drunk, and others are working from pickup artist playbooks, but most are reasonable).

Because she only has to deal with a handful of men, she has time to get to know them, and to decide whether to proceed. It's a ritual that's evolved over millennia, and it works fairly well.

New isn't always better

Unfortunately, our evolved courtship behaviours don't work so well in the world of online dating.

With the swipe-based model pioneered by Tinder, there's no rejection. There's nothing stopping men from swiping right on women who they wouldn't have the guts to approach in real life. So they swipe right.

Attractive women then have to deal with thousands of suitors every day. These men probably find them attractive (although auto-swiping is becoming depressingly common), but there's no way to spot the ones who wouldn't talk to them in real life.

Evaluating all these men is exhausting for women, especially when they only have a few photos and a brief description to work with. So some women resort to extremely restrictive — and often irrelevant — filters, hoping to weed out the bad ones, but losing a lot of good ones along the way. And other women just give up.

Which is one reason why online dating can be such a time-consuming lottery.

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